What 'tone down the rhetoric" really means
Well, speaking for myself, I cheerfully support their call for toned-down rhetoric on the left, if they agree to actively promote the same thing on the right.
That won't be easy. Politics has never been a game for the squeamish, and it's not unfair to say that political feelings haven't been this polarized since the 1960s. Once-routine debates about, say, infrastructure repair suddenly have become good-vs.-evil showdowns that grind governance to a halt.
In that battlefield, "tone down the rhetoric" means shift down from fevered emotional heights to argument based on facts and logic. Unfortunately, facts tend to take more work and deliver less of an emotional payback than chest-thumping, bloviating, name-calling, fear-mongering and good old-fashioned demagoguing.
President Trump knows about that. It is, in large part, how he became president. He exploited the phony, paranoid notion that President Barack Obama's birth certificate was a fake. He mocked his primary opponents like the class bully; he slandered Ted Cruz by linking his father to the Kennedy assassination. He urged his audiences to attack protesters and promised to put "crooked Hillary" Clinton "in jail."
You get the idea. I don't have to relive the campaign. President Trump has been doing enough of that on his own.
Besides, why linger on the past in our efforts to tone down the rhetoric. We have plenty of fresh examples of turned-up rhetoric every day.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
(c) 2017 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
